Between the I.R.S. and Benghazi, Mr. Cool Gets Hot

A couple of weeks ago, I was complaining to my editor that writing about President Obama’s second term was getting a little dull, and what we needed was a good scandal. Hey, presto! According to the Tweeps, the talking heads, and Matt Drudge, we now have not one but two of them: Benghazi redux, involving an alleged coverup, and the discovery of a purported I.R.S. “enemies list” that brings to mind our old friend Tricky Dick. Small wonder the White House moved Monday morning’s scheduled press conference with British Prime Minister David Cameron from the Rose Garden, where space is limited, to the East Room.

As the two leaders’ talks overran a bit, the excitement was almost too much to bear, and so were the clichés. “We are on pins and needles waiting for them,” Jake Tapper said on CNN. Over on Fox, where Christmas had arrived early, Brett Baier intoned, “The question is how high did it go? Who knew what when?” Baier was talking about the I.R.S. supposedly targeting conservative groups, which even Lawrence O’Donnell, who was doing an early shift on MSNBC, deemed a story with “legs.” His guest, David Corn, of Mother Jones, a magazine that sides with the President’s Republican critics about as often as Haley’s Comet comes around, agreed. “No weasel words should be the motto of the White House today,” he said.

When Barack and Dave finally arrived—no surnames necessary when these two bosom buds get together—the President immediately heaped praise on Mrs. Thatcher, which sounded suspiciously like a sop to the right. Then he invited Julie Pace, the A.P.’s White House correspondent, to ask the first question—an elongated query that may well have entered the Guinness Book of Records as the first seven-parter ever delivered at a press conference. (Three on the I.R.S., two on Benghazi, and two on Syria.) Obama waited patiently for her to finish. Then he delivered an answer he’d clearly prepared. “This is pretty straightforward,” he said. If, in fact, I.R.S. agents had been targeting conservative groups, “then that was outrageous” and “they have to be held fully accountable.”

After Nixon, no President can take lightly the suggestion, however outlandish, that someone working for him may have sicced the I.R.S. on his political enemies. Obama wasn’t going to fall into that trap. He could have pointed out that it remained to be seen whether the I.R.S. was simply doing its job in checking out whether the rash of new conservative groups that appeared during and after the 2010 midterms, some of which were reportedly affiliated with the Tea Party, deserved to be granted charity status. Instead, he played the role of outraged taxpayer, adding, “this is something people are properly concerned about.”

It was a clever, highly political answer, calmly delivered. Business as usual for Mr. Cool. But when he turned to Benghazi, his manner and voice changed. The story about the massaged talking points was a mere “sideshow,” he insisted, sounding irked and confrontational. The e-mails at the center of the scandal had been delivered to Capitol Hill three months ago, “and suddenly, three days ago, this gets spun up as if there’s something new to the story. There’s no ‘there’ there.”

At first, I thought Obama was laying it on for effect, but when he twice mistakenly said “Syria” instead of “Libya,” I had second thoughts. Obama doesn’t ordinarily misspeak. His voice grew harsh, and his face tightened. Going back over the timeline, he pointed out that just three days after Susan Rice’s famous appearance on the Sunday talk shows, in which she said the exact nature of the attack in Benghazi was unclear, another Administration official, Matt Olsen, had publicly described it as a terrorist attack. “Who executes some sort of coverup or effort to tamp things down for three days?” the President asked, his voice dripping with sarcasm. Far from this being a real story, it was another example of “political games here in Washington.”

He could have stopped there. In view of what are, as my colleague Alex Koppelman pointed out, some glaring discrepancies between the White House’s original statements about the talking points and the contents of the leaked e-mails, he probably should have stopped there. Instead, he continued to up the ante, effectively accusing the Republicans and their media allies of dishonoring the memory of Ambassador Stevens and other State Department officials “when we turn things like this into a political circus.”

For Cameron, whose opening remarks had revealed that he recently read a book about baseball, this was an opportunity to observe another ancient American rite: an embattled President berating his tormentors. The Prime Minister then had to deal with a six-part question of his own, which got him embroiled in his own domestic problems, particularly the Conservative Party’s internal splits on Europe. The networks didn’t give a hoot about that, of course, or about the two leaders’ differences on Syria, which remain pretty glaring. Once the two leaders left the dais, the coverage immediately returned to Libya and the I.R.S.

Obama, however, had done a pretty good job of getting out ahead of the I.R.S. story, as evidenced by the fact that, when he’d finished talking, Fox focussed on his statements on Benghazi, and whether he had accurately described the timing of Administration statements. (Brett Baier suggested that he hadn’t.) On MSNBC, too, the conversation was about Libya. O’Donnell, normally a big supporter of the Administration, said the press conference wouldn’t quell the questions about the talking points, adding, “That serves the interests of the opposition, but it may well also serve the interests of truth, as we find out more and more.”

On a normal day, such statements from an MSNBC host would cause concern in the White House. Today, I am not so sure. If forced to pick between a media obsessing about Benghazi or a media obsessing about I.R.S. abuses, the Administration would take the former every time, I would guess. Libya is a long way away, after all, and the person who stands to be damaged most as the story develops isn’t the President, it’s Hillary Clinton. The I.R.S. scandal, even if it doesn’t ultimately add up to very much, comes much closer to home.